


Nothing But Your Skin

by delgaserasca



Category: King Arthur (2004)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-22
Updated: 2013-12-22
Packaged: 2018-01-05 15:25:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,807
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1095612
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/delgaserasca/pseuds/delgaserasca
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"The land the Britons call home is not kind, but you are not accustomed to kindness. Yours are not a gentle people." Tristan scouts ahead of the knights. This is his lot.</p><p>Set during the knights' journey north.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Nothing But Your Skin

**Author's Note:**

  * For [hiddencait](https://archiveofourown.org/users/hiddencait/gifts).



> I had to default on my actual assignment because of time constraints, but then I found time to write after all, which is probably not the way to do it, but is unavoidable now.
> 
> Merry Christmas hiddencait! I hope this adds to your Yuletide joy. 
> 
> (Also: Isolde is the hawk. I read somewhere that it was actually called something like Melchior but, pffft. What a wasted opportunity! The hawk is definitely called Isolde.)

 

 

> This is history this is legend this is what we once were. Where the stories come from, what we are. When you fall in battle, they will take your body with the life you made in this world and set it off to sail behind you into the next, so that you will stay a king, remain forever the golden being you breathed as on this side of the mountain. When you pass, may your life follow you like a shadow into the light. When I go, bury me with nothing but my own skin.  
>  **\-- Anis Mojgani, _Cradle_**  
> 

 

 

Dawn is slow to approach this far north, but you need little light by which to see. From this point to the horizon is snow; from the horizon north is snow. From this point behind you is night, and all winter, everywhere. The land the Britons call home is not kind, but you are not accustomed to kindness. Yours are not a gentle people. 

The water in your cup has frozen overnight, and you had to thaw it to drink it. Your leathers are weighty, stiff from the cold and the wet. Even the woollen tunic which Vanora was persuaded to make for you is coarse against your skin, or would be if you could summon feeling to discern its texture. You are cosseted on all sides by iron – though it makes for a poor bedfellow it is better by your side than on a saddle. You learned that lesson the hard way. There is a breeze, and would that it were buffeted by the forest, but the ground has caught a chill. There is no life here, no green thing could grow in this barren wasteland. Only the trees, brought up by summer, now tall and bare in the frost. An empty land for an empty man. It suits you well.

There, in the distance, comes the white sun, slow to rouse but swift to shine once it passes the horizon. The light is blinding; the early morning sky is clear. In the distance you hear birdsong, wonder idly if Isolde flies close by, or if she has hidden herself in some lofty place. She will come to you when you need her. Yours is a meeting of two like souls, and she knows best when you have need of her.

You turn to see Arthur wake, his leathers groaning under the strain as he sits up and casts his eye about for you. Yours was the last watch; yours is almost always the last watch. You never were one for sleep. He will expect a report. You have followed him into every battle, sometimes eager, sometimes not, and you trust him with your life, but he is not of your people, and you do not always fathom his ways. It is not yours to question him, though he seems to relish whatever fight Lancelot brings to him. Yours is to acquiesce. Yours is to hunt. This is your gift, rough hewn and unsightly though it can be. Yours are not a gentle people.

 

 

As you knew he would, Arthur sends you to mark the path ahead. After two nights running pell-mell through the woodland north of the Wall, you have come to a clearing, and beyond the clearing, a lake. Whilst the others wake and eat, you circle the camp swiftly. A sharp whistle brings Isolde to your outstretched arm. Her beak is bloody; she has feasted better than you this morning. What have you found, little one? You admire her, your little huntress, your spirit of the sky. You know her hunger; it is your own. You found her on the north road, when first Arthur brought you along that dusty path, and summer still shone. She followed you from camp to camp, watched you from the higher branches of trees you may never pass again, watched you, and the iron in your hand and the bow on your back. Agravaine had scolded you for feeding her scraps of meat, crumbs of bread, thought you tender-hearted and weak, but by then you were hers to keep, and were you trod so did she follow. None could part you, though many have tried.

These solitary treks ahead of the main, they have always been yours, though not always so solitary. In years past, you would scout to the north, and others to the south, to watch for Woads in your wake, and before that, other barbarians in other lands. Galahad scoffs at your bloodlust, but he is just a boy, black haired like a Roman youth, he and Lancelot both so eager to bite at the chaff. You remember when you saw him first, small and underfed, and easy to lose his footing. Gawain would stand on one side, and you the other, ready to hoist Galahad to his feet again. Perhaps he has forgotten your first watch over him. It was so long ago. When he was able enough, you returned to the aft, made your seat next to Agravaine and Bedivere, and there, from first til last, there Dagonet would ride, pace even and unhurried, keeping watch over every last man. This was his ordained task from the first. You scout ahead; he scouts behind. His first watch was over you.

Galahad never took to the fight, bent against it from the first, fought fitfully and fearful til he came of age and at last his limbs lengthened to match his hurried stride. Pelleas took great joy in baiting him, and where once you could not fathom it, it pleases you now to do much the same. How the yoke of Rome chafes at Galahad's skin. You could not care less for the empire, or for Caesar; you could not care less for this endless winter; but it is your lot, and so you have taken with it. You are old enough to remember the siren song of home, though not so old as Bors or Dagonet. What a thing it must have been for them to have been taken from their farmsteads and brought before Arthur, made to bow their heads to a boy general, not yet blooded. What a thing it was for you, to be led out before your people and given to Rome, not yet ten summers born of a spring. 

Your father had readied you the best that he could, remembering his own years in battle. Cavalry, that is the name the Romans gave your people when they won dominion over them, but you knew them best as horse traders, nomads and merchants both. Your mother's people were fishermen; to them the hearth and home. You were ever your father's son, sullen and silent, and restless like the eastern winds. He was not a merciful man, but he was patient when patience was called for. He taught you to climb, to fish, to shoot with a bow twice your height. You were never to take more than you could carry, for the forest was rich, and greed was wasteful. He could catch a fish with his bare hands; could fell a tree in five blows. You saw him capture wild steeds and tame them to answer his hand and his alone. Not one thing was wasted in his hands. From the roots of a tree, a bow; from its fruit, sweet mead; from its sap a resin; from its boughs a boat. A horse, too, had many uses: a faithful steed, a hearty meal, a place to shelter against the rain.

But your father knew what others did not, that at the last it would be your own two feet that would carry you, and so he set you in the heart of a mighty forest, there to lead your own way home. It took you four nights the first time; two the second. On the third occasion, you scrambled up the tallest tree you could find and saw a path. You killed a wild boar, and dragged its carcass across the earth to land at your father's feet. That night, snow had fallen, thick and white and cloying, but your father built a fire, and sat you close by, plied you with mead and boar's meat, proud, and pleased and relieved.

Sarmatia saw snow, winters that filled the northern border and killed farm stock overnight. But it was never snow like what you have found in Britain; never wet and forgiving. The snow of your youthful expeditions was hard underfoot, and ran deep into the valleys. There are no valleys here, just an expanse of horizon stretching out until you see nothing but a distant haze. It comforts you, to look upon the edge of the world. You have heard tell that the Saxons fear it, believe the seas cast off the world's edge and plunder all sailors into a bottomless ocean. Because they fear it, it is your friend. Saxons claim all they see as their own, and kill all they own, like rabid Vikings. Vikings, at least, plunder for gold; Saxons plunder for land, and that is the deadlier pursuit. You cannot take a land that belongs to another man, unless you oust him from his seat: this you learned from Rome. When your father put his bow on your back and sent you to the care of high-handed Centurions, this is what he told you: that whatever gold the Romans offered, they would ask blood in return; whatever name they gave you, they would never call you own; whatever land they took would one day be taken back. No man can carry more than what he owns; this you knew from the hunt, and this, or so your father said, Rome would also learn.

Isolde knows this lesson well; eats only what she has caught, and spares none for later. You cast her up, up into the air and bid her find a path. Lead the way, little one, and she swoops round, once, twice, a third time, then sets off towards the end of the earth. You follow, quickly but carefully, conscious of the encroaching morn. Arthur expects your return.

 

 

The sun is still climbing when you return to the camp. Arthur is nowhere to be seen; offering prayers, no doubt, whilst the men ready themselves. Bors is needling Dagonet, stirring him to eat, to move, to speak, but Dagonet does as he pleases, and at his own pace. It has been four summers since Pelleas and Bedivere struck north of Hadrian's Wall; four years since they disappeared unto the end of the world, sent forward on Rome's command, far from their brothers, out into the unknown. They were never seen again, and each day since their steps took them from their brothers has rendered Dagonet quieter and smaller still, giant that he is. You stood on the battlements by his side as the oldest of his friends took their leave, and knew, even then, that neither would be seen again. Dagonet had known it too. By the shadows of his face, you can see it now: he will not wind his way home again. He will die in this barren place. He has chosen his lot.

You have no brothers; you have no uncles. Your mother had sisters, and your father had none. Your father and his father before him were the only sons of their line, and you shall be the last of yours. But from the day Rome took you from your village, you have had scores of kin, faces you saw for a moment; flesh you lived alongside for years. Pleasures are simple – wine, food, women and dice. You eat heartily when you can, have fought over berries and nuts, and fruit from the bough. You fight with them and for them and by their sides, and when tempers are roused you have been known to subdue them, force them to their knees. 

There had been a boy knight, with fair hair and small features, who had found you quick to anger, and hated you for the subjugation. Ywain, his name. He had died in his first battle, struck by an arrow through his throat when he turned to jest in the middle of a fight. How often you had cautioned him against this; how often you had entreated him to focus. Those that wish to die will die; those that will not listen will not be saved. All this is true. But to die from sheer stupidity— the stink of it infuriates you even now. Ywain, like others, had thought you hard of heart and mean spirited, but this is not the truth. The absence of kindness is not in itself a cruelty. Your father taught you this, and Agravaine reminded you. What Ywain failed to see – what Galahad will never fathom – is that this life is all that there is, and it is best to find what joy you can from it. The death of another is not your pursuit; you kill when killing is called for. But you take pride in knowing that you tread forth first. In every blow you serve, every arrow you loose, there, lo, your father's hand. If a man must kill another like a hunter severs a boar, then it ought to be done with dignity. This is why Arthur, more than any other Roman, is more than tolerable. Every battle is a sermon, sent up to his god, a prayer for benediction. You have no time for gods, no use for prayer, but know, even now, that to fight with purpose, to keep true aim, is a devotion unto itself. 

Why, Galahad asks, others have wondered, why do you love that empty road? One day, he remarked, you will go forth and we will never see you again. Would it be so bad? The way home seems as certain as the way ahead, and what is home but a memory. There is as much for you there as there is here. Your forefathers promised you for fifteen months of servitude, but it has been a lifetime, for it took years enough to reach your post, and with every loss, each year has doubled in length. You have lost count of the winters you have seen, lost count of the summers that have passed, know only that once the Sarmatians were forty strong or more, and now but a handful, with Dagonet a spectre of the man that he once was. Death will come, here in the snow or out in the wastes; at the hand of a Saxon or at the hand of a neighbour. You do not fear it; it is the way of all things. Even a mighty oak will fall under the blow of an axe. To cower from the inevitable is to petrify a man, render his body stone, and his blood thin like water, and what would be the use? Fight, flee, fuck – live to see another day and it is one more day you have snatched from your enemy. All the pleasures count, even breath. 

You go out ahead of the men so that they need not venture into the unknown. Arthur has put you on a steed and sent you into the forest to wind your way home. You do not fear death; it is the next journey. But you do not envy those who ventured on ahead of you. You are not so brave as that, only frank and unsentimental. You are not Bedivere and Pelleas, swallowed up into the unknown; you are not Caradoc, slain by the Woads; you are not Gaheris, fallen in Gaul, nor Percival fallen in Cumbria at the hands of the Brigantes. You are not now nor shall you ever be Arthur, or Dagonet, or brave, brutish Agravaine who stood two heads above any man, and whose shoulders were as wide as the rushing river bed which you crossed one spring as the knights journeyed north. Agravaine, who kept your council and stood by your side when the Centurions took you from the only home you had ever known. Agravaine, who led you forward, and did not look back, sure that you would follow. Agravaine, a brother, though you had none, and called none your own.

It was a day such as this when he was killed. The skirmish was fleeting; its effects were lasting. You do not dwell on it. You do not feel the cold. Yours are not a sentimental people. When Arthur clasps your arm in his, this is his thanks for undertaking what the others no longer can. I wonder, he says, where would be without the surety of your step to guide us?

Dead, you think, all dead, and maybe the better for it.

You turn your steed and lead the way north.

**end.**

**Author's Note:**

> I have not done any research about times, dates and locations, nor about the history of Sarmatia mostly because the filmmakers didn't either. I mean, Sarmatia is essentially Persia. This is not even remotely clear in the film.
> 
> Anyway, this fic was supposed to be about how Tristan was a real boy until his closest comrades amongst the knights were killed in battle (everyone in the film has a partner, except for Tristan who has...his hawk. Yeah). However, it sort of turned into the story of how he'd never had friends, and never wanted any.


End file.
